New books help you get to know your food culture

Thursday

Aug 26, 2010 at 3:15 AM

MICHELE KAYAL,For The Associated Press

If you think apple pie is the all-American food, think again. An inspiring collection of new books dips deep into the melting pot to serve up stories and recipes that trace the multi-ethnic and cultural origins of what our country eats.

Jane Ziegelman's "97 Orchard" offers an eminently readable history of five families — German, Irish, Italian and Eastern European — all living in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the last century. The book is filled with fun facts — that pickles were once considered a stimulant; that goose pastrami was bar food.

But the book's beauty lies in the insight and intelligence with which Ziegelman tells the story of real, live people who came to this country and brought their food with them. Using census records, shopping lists, recipes and other documents, she brings her characters to life, and illuminates how immigrant food such as hot dogs and pizza became American food. A must-read for anyone interested in food, ethnicity and culture.

In "Breaking Bread," chef and English professor Lynne Christy Anderson has collected stories about the power of food to recall a lost world for those who have left much behind. She leads us around Boston and its suburbs to a Lebanese family that cuts grape leaves at the nearby arboretum, a house painter from Cote d'Ivoire who makes a mean fish dish, a nurse's aide who clings to the groundnut stew of her native Ghana.

Anderson also turns the pages over to her subjects, who offer advice (only talk to your husband when he's got a full stomach) and reminiscences (rum coke, and dancing always fueled cooking in Xotchil Gaarn's Venezuela home) that informs and delights.

Told with verve and voice, Joseph Dabney's "The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking" offers an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) history of this Southern cuisine and the immigrants who influenced it. More than 130 recipes for items like she-crab soup, chicken bog, and shad roe with grits are sprinkled lightly through text from locals, home cooks and well-known chefs in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. A thorough and informative look at this very specific Southern cuisine.

Joan Aller's "Cider Beans, Wild Greens and Dandelion Jelly" tackles the foods of southern Appalachia with credit to the native and immigrant cultures that spawned them. Cherokee Indians originally cultivated the area from East Tennessee across the northern parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and were closely followed by the Spanish, African slaves, and Europeans from other American colonies.

Primarily a cookbook, "Cider Beans" offers more than 100 recipes for items like Cherokee pepper pot soup made of beef bones and bell peppers; an African chicken-cabbage soup sweetened with Vidalias and tomato; German cabbage and meat pies called bierocks; and chocolate gravy from the Melungeouns, a tribal people possibly descended from Iberians who fled the inquisition.

An outlier in this category but fascinating nonetheless is "What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets." Photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Alusio — whose award winning 2006 "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats" launched its own genre — offer a coffee table-sized photo essay documenting what 80 individuals in 30 countries eat in a single day.

Organized according to the number of calories consumed — from least to most — the photos take you from a Maasai herdswoman in Kenya posing next to her 800 calories worth of corn porridge, banana, tea and water to the 12,300-calorie fiasco of the British snacker, ballooned by cookies, chips, Twix bars and bacon sandwiches. A commentary on food, health and culture that would communicate across any lines, even without the absorbing text and stunning statistics.

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"97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement" by Jane Ziegelman (Smithsonian/Harper Collins, 2010)